A History of English Literature

by Robert Huntington Fletcher

The revolt of the nation was directed partly against the irresponsible injustice of the Puritan military government but largely also against the excessive moral severity of the whole Puritan régime. Accordingly a large part of the nation, but particularly the Court, now plunged into an orgy of self-indulgence in which moral restraints almost ceased to be regarded. The new king and his nobles had not only been led by years of proscription and exile to hate on principle everything that bore the name of Puritan, but had spent their exile at the French Court, where utterly cynical and selfish pursuit of pleasure and licentiousness of conduct were merely masked by conventionally polished manners. The upshot was that the quarter century of the renewed Stuart rule was in almost all respects the most disgraceful period of English history and life. In everything, so far as possible, the restored Cavaliers turned their backs on their immediate predecessors. The Puritans, in particular, had inherited the enthusiasm which had largely made the greatness of the Elizabethan period but had in great measure shifted it into the channel of their religion. Hence to the Restoration courtiers enthusiasm and outspoken emotion seemed marks of hypocrisy and barbarism. In opposition to such tendencies they aimed to realize the ideal of the man of the world, sophisticated, skeptical, subjecting everything to the scrutiny of the reason, and above all, well-bred. Well-bred, that is, according to the artificial social standards of a selfish aristocratic class; for the actual manners of the courtiers, as of such persons at all times, were in many respects disgustingly crude. In religion most of them professed adherence to the English Church (some to the Catholic), but it was a conventional adherence to an institution of the State and a badge of party allegiance, not a matter of spiritual conviction or of any really deep feeling. The Puritans, since they refused to return to the English (Established) Church, now became known as Dissenters.

The men of the Restoration, then, deliberately repudiated some of the chief forces which seem to a romantic age to make life significant. As a natural corollary they concentrated their interest on the sphere of the practical and the actual. In science, particularly, they continued with marked success the work of Bacon and his followers. Very shortly after the Restoration the Royal Society was founded for the promotion of research and scientific knowledge, and it was during this period that Sir Isaac Newton (a man in every respect admirable) made his vastly important discoveries in physics, mathematics, and astronomy.

In literature, both prose and verse, the rationalistic and practical spirit showed itself in the enthroning above everything else of the principles of utility and common sense in substance and straightforward directness in style. The imaginative treatment of the spiritual life, as in 'Paradise Lost' or 'The Faerie Queene,' or the impassioned exaltation of imaginative beauty, as in much Elizabethan poetry, seemed to the typical men of the Restoration unsubstantial and meaningless, and they had no ambition to attempt flights in those realms. In anything beyond the tangible affairs of visible life, indeed, they had little real belief, and they preferred that literature should restrain itself within the safe limits of the known and the demonstrable. Hence the characteristic Restoration verse is satire of a prosaic sort which scarcely belongs to poetry at all. More fortunate results of the prevailing spirit were the gradual abandonment of the conceits and irregularities of the 'metaphysical' poets, and, most important, the perfecting of the highly regular rimed pentameter couplet, the one great formal achievement of the time in verse. In prose style the same tendencies resulted in a distinct advance. Thitherto English prose had seldom attained to thorough conciseness and order; it had generally been more or less formless or involved in sentence structure or pretentious in general manner; but the Restoration writers substantially formed the more logical and clear-cut manner which, generally speaking, has prevailed ever since.

Quite consistent with this commonsense spirit, as the facts were then interpreted, was the allegiance which Restoration writers rendered to the literature of classical antiquity, an allegiance which has gained for this period and the following half-century, where the same attitude was still more strongly emphasized, the name 'pseudo-classical.' We have before noted that the enthusiasm for Greek and Latin literature which so largely underlay the Renaissance took in Ben Jonson and his followers, in part, the form of a careful imitation of the external technique of the classical writers. In France and Italy at the same time this tendency was still stronger and much more general. The seventeenth century was the great period of French tragedy (Corneille and Racine), which attempted to base itself altogether on classical tragedy. Still more representative, however, were the numerous Italian and French critics, who elaborated a complex system of rules, among them, for tragedy, those of the 'three unities,' which they believed to dominate classic literature. Many of these rules were trivial and absurd, and the insistence of the critics upon them showed an unfortunate inability to grasp the real spirit of the classic, especially of Greek, literature. In all this, English writers and critics of the Restoration period and the next half-century very commonly followed the French and Italians deferentially. Hence it is that the literature of the time is pseudo-classical (false classical) rather than true classical. But this reduction of art to strict order and decorum, it should be clear, was quite in accord with the whole spirit of the time.

One particular social institution of the period should be mentioned for its connection with literature, namely the coffee houses, which, introduced about the middle of the century, soon became very popular and influential. They were, in our own idiom, cafés, where men met to sip coffee or chocolate and discuss current topics. Later, in the next century, they often developed into clubs.

MINOR WRITERS. The contempt which fell upon the Puritans as a deposed and unpopular party found stinging literary expression in one of the most famous of English satires, Samuel Butler's 'Hudibras.' Butler, a reserved and saturnine man, spent much of his uneventful life in the employ (sometimes as steward) of gentlemen and nobles, one of whom, a Puritan officer, Sir Samuel Luke, was to serve as the central lay-figure for his lampoon. 'Hudibras,' which appeared in three parts during a period of fifteen years, is written, like previous English satires, in rough-and-ready doggerel verse, in this case verse of octosyllabic couplets and in the form of a mock-epic. It ridicules the intolerance and sanctimonious hypocrisy of the Puritans as the Cavaliers insisted on seeing them in the person of the absurd Sir Hudibras and his squire Ralph (partly suggested by Cervantes' Don Quixote and Sancho). These sorry figures are made to pass very unheroically through a series of burlesque adventures. The chief power of the production lies in its fire of witty epigrams, many of which have become familiar quotations, for example:

He could distinguish, and divide,
A hair 'twixt south and south-west side.
Compound for sins they are inclined to
By damning those they have no mind to.

Though the king and Court took unlimited delight in 'Hudibras' they displayed toward Butler their usual ingratitude and allowed him to pass his latter years in obscure poverty.

Some of the other central characteristics of the age appear in a unique book, the voluminous 'Diary' which Samuel Pepys (pronounced Peps), a typical representative of the thrifty and unimaginative citizen class, kept in shorthand for ten years beginning in 1660. Pepys, who ultimately became Secretary to the Admiralty, and was a hard-working and very able naval official, was also astonishingly naïf and vain. In his 'Diary' he records in the greatest detail, without the least reserve (and with no idea of publication) all his daily doings, public and private, and a large part of his thoughts. The absurdities and weaknesses, together with the better traits, of a man spiritually shallow and yet very human are here revealed with a frankness unparalleled and almost incredible. Fascinating as a psychological study, the book also affords the fullest possible information about all the life of the period, especially the familiar life, not on dress-parade. In rather sharp contrast stands the 'Diary' of John Evelyn, which in much shorter space and virtually only in a series of glimpses covers seventy years of time. Evelyn was a real gentleman and scholar who occupied an honorable position in national life; his 'Diary,' also, furnishes a record, but a dignified record, of his public and private experience.

THE RESTORATION DRAMA. The moral anarchy of the period is most strikingly exhibited in its drama, particularly in its comedy and 'comedy of manners.' These plays, dealing mostly with love-actions in the setting of the Court or of fashionable London life, and carrying still further the general spirit of those of Fletcher and Shirley a generation or two earlier, deliberately ridicule moral principles and institutions, especially marriage, and are always in one degree or another grossly indecent. Technically they are often clever; according to that definition of literature which includes a moral standard, they are not literature at all. To them, however, we shall briefly return at the end of the chapter.